Creole Ned

I checked again and the Featured Items are on a single page now, so it looks like they may have culled a few things to give the freebie more visibility.

Why do you hate fun?

Thanks! Maybe they could call them something crazy like Enhancement Boosters.

What do these boosters boost? XP? Inf? Enhancements? Sex appeal?

Damning with faint praise!

Like the other arc in my sig, these were both created as alternatives to the starting contacts for people (me) who had grown tired of them. This was before the Atlas Park revamp so you're probably better off going with the dev missions now.

Because they were meant as alternate starting points, I kept the stories simple. Bad kid, likes fire. Weird aliens with weird demands. I also purposely kept the mission text to a minimum. When you're advancing from level 1 to level 2 you probably don't need to experience War and Peace in the process.

I've always meant to go back and refine the arcs and maybe I will someday but creating yet another alt is more alluring. I offer a warning on the Fourtean arc: the ending is pretty dumb. Also, I must have been feeling mean to include Vahzilok in the second-to-last mission.

I will say this, though -- probably the toughest challenge I found in the mission architect was creating custom characters that are both reasonable to fight and still reward decent XP. I tweaked powers a fair bit before settling on them and deliberately used the custom characters in only one mission per arc.

I now have the desire to revise my arcs. But...my alts!

These are all good questions. It's a shame the actual description of the item in the market doesn't answer any of them.

He used Ouroboros to travel back in time and remove Cryptic from existence.

If you have low level characters that pre-date the Atlas Park revamp they can still run the missions from the old contacts.

Nah, it's a good chance for discussion about old school City of Heroes.

Just recently RobotPants and I were duoing with our low 30s corruptor and dominator. We'd finished the Croatoa arc (less the TF) but weren't high enough to start on the Rikti War Zone. We'd played the appropriate SSA, done some shiny new tip missions and still weren't level 35 yet. It seemed we'd reached a point where we had run out of 'new' content (or missed it) so we decided to check out good ol' Lou Pasterelli way in the back of Brickstown. Lou's been standing there, surrounded by purple-conning enemies (if you take him as a contact when you are level-appropriate) since April 2004. His legs must be getting tired.

Lou deals mainly with the Devouring Earth and has a few arcs involving them. His first mission, though, was to visit the Warburg PvP liaison in Kings Row. Hello, auto-complete!

Trying to get our missions to match was a crapshoot because they are pretty much handed out randomly, so we ended up repeating a few. Lou also had lots of hunts -- 'defeat 35 DE', 'defeat 35 Crey', sometimes they were generic, sometimes they required you to go to a specific zone (several hunts were in Crey's Folly, a hazard zone). When Lou gave out regular missions they were often 'defeat all' and some were stealth 'defeat all' -- you'd rescue the five scientists and the mission wouldn't complete until you found and defeated every last DE hiding in that sprawling, multi-level tech lab.

By the time we completed all of his missions I had gained two levels, in no small part because so many missions required wiping out every last opponent you came across.

In the end I didn't wish Lou to go hug the Hamidon and never come back. I think a lot of these old contacts can be used as filler and don't need to be removed. But they could stand to have missions tidied up:

- slim down the numbers needed for hunts. I'd max them out at 20. I don't think you need to eliminate hunts because they are typically presented as an option unless you have run out of other missions.
- remove the 'go talk to so and so' missions. Make these pop-up contacts you can safely ignore. Security chief, Wincott, PvP liaisons, Mission Architect, etc.
- reduce the number of Defeat All missions and have each one clearly labeled. I actually don't mind the occasional mission that needs to be full cleared, just don't pile them on.

That's about it, really. A lot of the old stories are generic but some are still good fun to go through and there's a simplicity that appeals after all the phasing, multiple objectives and stop-and-start of the newer content. A cleansing of the palette, if you will.

The work postings for Paragon (under Mountain View) specifically mention the project is a 'next gen MMO' and 'new IP':

Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to have the signature characters remain in the background of the game, handing out missions and looking stoic/broody/whatever suits them.

I'd *much* prefer the devs address content gaps in the main game over perpetuating the SSAs.

I also happen to think the SSAs are seriously overpriced. As a free or premium player I would not have paid to play them. I wonder how many did?